(Necessary) Duplicate Content On Your Site Can Now Be Controlled
There is an Ethical Way to Handle Duplicate Content
Good news everybody. Just the other day, Google, Yahoo! and MSN came together to “endorse” an acceptable way to handle the issue of “necessary” duplicate content on your website or blog. When I say “necessary”, I mean it is unavoidable that multiple URLs may show up for the same content.
It’s called a Canonical tag, which looks like this example:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish” />
This simple bit of HTML coding sits up in the <head> section of your website and “tells” the spiders how to deal with the page if it is a page of duplicate content that you want to control as far as indexing is concerned.
There are various reasons that may dictate the need to have duplicate content. One possibility (and quite a common one) could be due to the fact you have an e-commerce store. As an example, you may have to provide the same information about a product under different categories on different pages, thusly different URLs will be generated.
As long as you aren’t producing duplicate pages of content out of sheer copywriting laziness to utilize a keyword phrase you’re trying to rank highly for, then I have nothing against one of my clients having duplicate content on their site. As long as the duplicate content pages are serving a useful purpose for the website visitor, then there is no getting around the need for it.
However, it used to prove to be a not-so-good thing SEO-wise. There were other work-arounds, but things just got a little easier. Now there is a great solution!
I don’t need to repeat great information that is already sitting out there on the web, so I’ll give you a taste and the link to this full article:
Specify your canonical
Google Webmaster Central Blog; Thursday, February 12, 2009 at 12:30 PM
“Carpe diem on any duplicate content worries: we now support a format that allows you to publicly specify your preferred version of a URL. If your site has identical or vastly similar content that’s accessible through multiple URLs, this format provides you with more control over the URL returned in search results. It also helps to make sure that properties such as link popularity are consolidated to your preferred version.”
“Let’s take our old example of a site selling Swedish fish. Imagine that your preferred version of the URL and its content looks like this …” To read the full article: Specify your canonical.
And for a quick watch here’s a great interview with Google’s own Matt Cutts discussing the subject:
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Check out what others are saying about this post...[...] Those busy little spiders won’t know which page you consider the most important page of information. Many e-commerce sites encounter the issue of duplicate pages of content because they may have to cross reference a product under more than one category listing. There are ways to combat this, and you’ll find a newly introduced solution to the handling of “necessary” duplicate content here in my article on: Canonical Tags. [...]